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It's all our fault
NOTE: roughly nine hours after writing this, I did a fairly significant revision of this post. If you read it before 8:45 AM Eastern on Friday, it's changed.
Throughout the end of the campaign, a friend of mine has been sharing with us editorials from The Wall Street Journal, largely about McCain's greatness relative to Obama's incompetence. Today, he sent out an editorial from the WSJ in defense of Bush: "The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace: Why Must Our Enemies Be Thinking?" (with any luck, this link will work for the next week or so) by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro.
According to recent Gallup polls, the president's average approval rating is below 30% -- down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.
This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, "Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust."
Maybe if words alone served to shape reality, Shapiro's position would have merit. Just saying that he would work to earn it doesn't mean that he did. He also famously said he was "a uniter, not a divider," but to blame Bush's failure to unite America on his contentious liberals who couldn't stand his conservative positions and conservatives who couldn't stand his efforts to work with Democrats doesn't ring remotely true from even a cursory look at the historical record.
Almost from top to bottom, Bush's presidency has been based on the kind of unilateralism he showed in the run-up to the Iraq war. He wanted to work with the UN too... as long as they were willing to go to war instead of considering any other solution. At home, he wanted desperately to work with both liberals and conservatives. .. as long as both would do exactly what he wanted them to do. Otherwise they were "unpatriotic" for--at first--questioning their President in a time of war and--when they finally grew spines--for actually opposing him.
The campaigns he ran in '00 and '04 were the first indicator of how willing he was to work with others, with the unfair smear tactics he used against McCain in the 2000 primaries and again with Gore and Kerry in the general elections speak loudly against a genuine desire to work with the other side. On display from the beginning was a personality unsuited to working with others.
I have some sympathy with what Shapiro is saying: "Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country's current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control." That's fair enough: George W. Bush didn't cause the threat of radical Islamic terrorism; he just used it to justify a war that could hardly have been justified otherwise (then mismanage it), curtail freedoms at home, and gather unprecedented power to the executive branch. Let's not forget as well the way that important positions both domestically and in the rebuilding of Iraq were based more often on narrowly-partisan politics rather than competence. Oh, but surely that isn't Bush's fault, is it? Well, Shapiro will tell us that "Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them." Oh, so that's the problem. In other words, if people would just shut up and let the President do what he wants without question, we'd probably have all our problems solved by now.
The way the justice department was apparently run speaks to this kind of narrow partisanship, as he sought to remake the judiciary along party lines. The way Katrina was mismanaged speaks to appointments made out of cronyism without regard to competence. Are these the actions of someone who's tried so hard to work with Democrats and Republicans alike? No, there's a reason why liberals and old-school conservatives alike despise Bush: he's earned it and damaged his own party in the process.
Reading Bush's words as quoted by Shapiro upon his victory in '04, he sounds remarkably like Obama: "Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust." It remains to be seen whether Obama will be more successful in this regard than Bush was, but the high-road campaign he ran speaks well of his ability to actually achieve what, for Bush, seemed like empty rhetoric from the start. I also seem to remember Bush crowing about the "mandate" that his re-election bespoke, yet his margin of victory was incredibly narrow. Talk of mandates speak of a style of governance in which the President can do what he wishes because he has the support of the American people. Obama never spoke of mandates, despite his overwhelming victory. He spoke of working together, of facing the challenges ahead of us, and of the sacrifices necessary to do so. Maybe he won't be able to do it, maybe he's even as insincere about it as Bush obviously was, but at this point in time, Obama's claims to truly bipartisanism in government seem far more credible than Bush's ever were.